Staying Serious, to a Joyful Beat

Arcade Fire Lightens Up (a Bit) on ‘Reflektor’

Arcade Fire, led by Régine Chassagne and Win Butler, played a concert in Brooklyn this month as the Reflektors.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The rollout for Arcade Fire’s fourth studio album, “Reflektor,” released on Tuesday, has been all about fun. On television and YouTube, the band introduced new songs wearing glittery mock-1970s costumes, sandwiched between comedy bits. Billed as the Reflektors, Arcade Fire has been staging pop-up shows that come on as dance parties, with the band performing onstage between disc jockey sets, while mirror balls gleam overhead. The initial musical impression of “Reflektor,” the song that starts the album, is the happy thump of its disco beat.

In other words, Arcade Fire — the indie-rock band that has reached arenas with ambitious songs and albums about mortality, community, memory and hope — couldn’t be proclaiming any more emphatically that, with this album, it’s lightening up. But, really, is it?

Not exactly.

Rhythmically and sonically, yes. On its first three albums, Arcade Fire placed its big thoughts in ringing, marchlike anthems, like “Wake Up” and “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” that earned the admiration of elder practitioners like David Bowie (who sings a cameo in “Reflektor”) and U2. But for many earnest rockers — Mr. Bowie, U2 and Radiohead among them — those marches can grow sodden, ponderous and all too predictable. That’s when they look for a lift from dance music, as U2 did on “Achtung, Baby,” and Mr. Bowie did on “Young Americans.” Now, it’s Arcade Fire’s turn.

The band enlisted James Murphy alongside its longtime collaborator, Markus Dravs, to produce “Reflektor.” Mr. Murphy, as both the leader of LCD Soundsystem and the co-founder of DFA Records, is a connoisseur and hybridizer of dance music — particularly, but not exclusively, analog-era music from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when punk, disco, art-rock and pop were sharing concepts and dance floors.

It’s probably Mr. Murphy who got the Latin percussion popping in the title track (and perhaps pushed it toward its seven-minute length, stretched out like a 12-inch disco remix); polished the Motown-style bass line and Roxy Music guitar jabs in “We Exist”; and overlaid the mechanized, asymmetrical syncopations of New Order into what might have been another march, “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus).”

Yet Arcade Fire also has its own rhythmic impetus: Haitian music. Win Butler, the band’s lead singer, and his wife, Régine Chassagne — whose parents are Haitian — are Arcade Fire’s main songwriters, and they have repeatedly visited the island, lately to aid relief efforts. Haitian rhythms have infused Arcade Fire songs from the beginning, but they’re even stronger on “Reflektor”— especially in “Here Comes the Night Time,” which switches between the breakneck percussive rush of Haiti’s rara carnival music and the swaying lilt of Haitian kompas, both repeatedly transformed by the production.

Photo

Arcade Fire, with its frontman Win Butler, has a new danceable album, “Reflektor.”Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

While “Here Comes the Night Time” sounds like the title for a simple club banger, it’s not. The lyrics are about intolerant religion versus the redemptive power of music: “If there’s no music in heaven, then what’s it for?,” Mr. Butler sings.

Arcade Fire, like few bands in its generation, still upholds the idea of an album as a full-length statement, not a grab-bag of potential singles. It programmed “Reflektor” as a two-disc set. The lyrics on “Reflektor” revolve around big subjects: love, death, individuality, the afterlife, technology. “We fell in love when I was 19/And now we’re staring at a screen,” Mr. Butler sings in “Reflektor.”

Through the album there’s tension and uncertainty in Mr. Butler’s vocals, which he blurts out in short-breathed, defiant phrases; even the snappiest disco suit won’t make him suave. (Ms. Chassagne’s high voice arrives now and then to offer consolation and a cooler head.)

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The album’s lyrics allude to Kierkegaard’s ideas about a “reflective age,” when passion and story line have been replaced by ambiguity and passive contemplation. And they trace a loose plotline similar to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: the musician who plays songs that are so beautiful that they persuade Death to give his lover a second chance, though the musician will only lose her again. (Auguste Rodin’s statue of Orpheus and Eurydice is on the album cover.) The songs move through love, rebellious self-affirmation, a struggle to stay together and, at the end, a ghostly mourning. Six minutes of wordless sound at the end of the album, in billowing, burbling, sustained loops reminiscent of Terry Riley’s late-1960’s compositions, may be a glimpse of an eternal next world.

The band refuses to let the hefty concepts weigh down “Reflektor.” Arcade Fire, which had already made itself a mini-orchestra in and out of the studio, now moves just as audaciously in surreal electronic realms.

“Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)” merges kinetic Haitian drumming with a string-laden, Beatles-tinged ballad that’s eventually divebombed by a full-frequency-spectrum whoosh. And the reggae of “Flashbulb Eyes” becomes a thicket of echoes, electronics, percussion and guitar twangs arriving from all directions. Some of the tracks go on longer than necessary, but it’s an excess of generosity.

Arcade Fire has soaked up more than carnival and club rhythms for “Reflektor.” It has gathered the deepest lesson of carnival: that joyful dance music can hold protest, healing, solidarity and transcendence. It has also taken something from the Orpheus myth, in which the musician loses his true love forever because he looks back too soon. The one thing Arcade Fire won’t do on “Reflektor” is look back.

A version of this article appears in print on October 29, 2013, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Staying Serious, To a Joyful Beat. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe